The Inception hours

The Hours by Cunningham is a work that has a constant dialogue with the Mrs. Dalloway novel witten by Virginia Woolf, but it also has an internal dialogue of three voices (Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown and Mrs Dalloway). A series of situations lead to similar problems in three different eras.

1.  Early 20th Century:

The first character is Virginia Woolf, She is an English writer in 1923 is writing Mrs. Dalloway and in 1941 and committed suicide . Between those dates the story unfolds. TIME: POST WORLD WAR I

2. Late 20th Century:

The second woman is Laura Brown, a housewife married to a WW II veteran. This story takes place in one day in 1949. Brown is a young woman living the average post-war socioeconomic class. Like Woolf, she has a double life, except that she only shows one of the the two faces with the rest. Her frustration comes from being a housewife whose past and present are marked by imagination and fantasy from her readings. As presented in the text she is currently trying to adjust herself the life of a married woman, but she consistently fails ( for example, giving kiss to Kitty).

3. 21st Century:

The third woman is Clarissa Vaughan, an independent and successful editor. It is clearly the only dynamic character in the novel. This 51-years-old woman was a beautiful hippie woman and still retains her elegant and erotic appeal. She is a lesbian and maintains a traditional , stable and harmonious relationship with her partner Sally.

For the other characters, the world they live in is superfluous and their life is not full but Mrs Dalloway seems to be the way out for Virginia and Laura.

In the temporal aspect the novel maintains a certain linearity ( from the beginning of the day until it ends). However, there are multiple overlays because we deal with different periods in

time and while we read the novel there is an eloquent dialogue between these women living in different eras.

"Of the existing factors in postmodern narrative the researcher is going to work on, intertextuality, stream of consciousness style, fragmentation and representation respectively, which are used in Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours." ( Narinabad 257)

In this sense we can make a connection between this novel and the movie Inception.

Inception is a science fiction movie produced, written and directed by Christopher Nolan in 2010. Basically, the movie plot is developed in a world in which sience and technology has made possible for people to share the dream space (of course few people know about this), at the same time, to share the mind with others through the dreamspace makes it possible to access the subconcious level of someone to extract valuable information. During the movie they explain that people can also put an idea in the most subconcoious part of the mind od somene that is represented in the dream as a safe, a bank or something similar.

Now, the analogy than can be drawn between this two pieces is the following:

According to the movie: one person has an idea, and creates a new reality  but this person plants this new reality into another person’s mind  having an effect on this person changing the view of the world that this person has.

You may ask: Why this analogy?

Well, in the movie, when someone puts an idea into the most subconcious part of your mind you'll wake up having a different perception of your reality, as if suddenly you realized something was supposed to be or to not to be. But the "stranger" has to go through different stages of conciousness before he gets to were the idea can be planted.

WATCH!!

the idea of entering somebody's mind and having different stages of conciousness can be compared to the literary terms of  Intertextuality is key in Cuningham's The Hours as a literary terms stream of conciousness and intertextuality.

"The postmodern term “intertextuality,” which focuses on the interplay and interrelation of texts, [...]" (Narinabad 258)

Following this line, the intertextual relation in The hours compared to the movie is the following:

Virginia Woolf in The Hours would be the person that enters somebody'smind, which in this case is Laura Braun. Woolf will express her own feelings and will draw her own life somehow in the book she is writting: Mrs. Dalloway. This ideas and feelings will change the perception that Laura Brown has of her own life because she will realize that she wants to be like Mrs Dalloway. the different stages of concoiousness are presented in the book during the dialogue between the 3 women.

WATCH!!

Narinabad, Hajar Abbasi. "A Study of Postmodern Narrative in Michael Cunningham's The Hours." International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature 1.4: 257-67.International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature. Web. 9 Oct. 2014. <http://www.ijalel.org/pdf/140.pdf>
Inception. Warner Bros. Entertainment, 2010. Film.

Laughter duality in P&P

It is a universally acknowledge truth in our culture that fools’ mouth are full with laughter. Is this so? Well, according to what we can see in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen this is not entirely true.

In P&P we can see different characters representing different moral or intellectual values. For example we have our protagonist, Miss Elizabeth Bennet. We know that Lizzy not only was intelligent, but also a fan of laughter as we find her saying “What a shame, for I dearly love to laugh.”(Austen 36)

So, does this mean that Lizzy is a fool? Not at all! I think that her laughter comes from her clever sense of humor. Moreover, if fools are likely to laugh – as her sister Lydia – why does Lizzy admit that she loves to do it? Well, I think Lizzy is not afraid of what people might think of her. She does worry about her family wellbeing, but the fact that she rejected two proposals, walks alone without a chaperon, reads books instead of embroidering or whatever women were supposed to do at the time in which the novel takes place, makes Lizzy an extraordinary uncommon woman whose laughter shows everything but foolishness. On the contrary, she is very self-confident, bright and cultured. A woman eager to discuss relevant topics and most of all, give her opinion (a well-formed one by the way)

On the other hand we have the aforementioned Lydia. She is another woman from Austen’s book that adores to laugh. But her laugh comes from a different motivation. Lydia is reckless, and all her laughter comes from the fact that she doesn’t care about anything but having fun. Even if she or the ones she loved were prejudiced (harmed) by her.

"MY DEAR HARRIET,
You will laugh when you know where I am gone, and I cannot help laughing myself at your surprise to-morrow morning, as soon as I am missed. I am going to Gretna Green, and if you cannot guess with who, I shall think you a simpleton, for there is but one man in the world I love, and he is an angel. I should never be happy without him, so think it no harm to be off. You need not send them word at Longbourn of my going, if you do not like it, for it will make the surprise the greater when I write to them and sign my name Lydia Wickham. What a good joke it will be! I can hardly write for laughing. […] Your affectionate friend,
LYDIA BENNET." (Austen 167)

I am not the only one who thinks the same. While I was looking for some information or inspiration to write about, I run into a publication of Elvira Casal. She couldn’t explain better the laughter issue in a few lines. She said:

“Although Elizabeth’s love of laughter is clearly of a different sort than Lydia’s, the presence of her wild, unreflecting, and sexually precocious sister in the novel tells us something about Elizabeth and her laughter.  On the most basic level, Lydia serves as a foil for Elizabeth.  There are many parallels between the sisters:  Like Elizabeth, Lydia likes to laugh.  Like Elizabeth, she is the favorite child of one of their parents.  Like Elizabeth, she does not always observe convention.  Like Elizabeth, she finds Wickham attractive.  There the resemblance seems to end, and the reader is usually more struck by the contrasts.  Yet the only real contrast that matters is that Elizabeth thinks and discriminates.  If Lydia’s love of laughter is implicitly linked to her sexuality, we may assume that Elizabeth’s is also, though Elizabeth will handle her sexuality with greater thought and discrimination.” (Casal 12)

Interesting, doesn't it? So, according to this, pride and prejudice, as well as laughter, also have a good and a bad side. The good one of being selective and the bad one of being too suspicious. Maybe that is the reason why the title of the novel was changed from First Impressions to Pride and Prejudice. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that it defines better all of these aspects of the book and also the internal journey from there (P&P) to the transparency of love.

Now you see that the duality in this wonderful novel is present in almost every aspect of it, even on laughter. 

 What do you think about it? Any other duality you'd like to mention? (besides the one about the types of love that Raúl mentioned in other post)

References

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. The Project Gutenberg EBook. 2008. PDF 
                      <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1342/1342-pdf.pdf>

Casal, Elvira. Laughing at Mr. Darcy: Wit and Sexuality in Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen Society of America, 2001. October 2014
          <http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol22no1/casal.html>

Love in Pride and Prejudice

According to what we have been reading and discussing in class on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, I have come to realize how much it actually relates to what other authors in different disciplines refer to as different kinds of love.

From a classical --or Plato's-- perspective, we could consider this slippery term we call love to be divided in eros (mainly related to a more physical type of relationship, though not always necessarily sexual), agape (considered the highest form of love a human being in --allegedly-- able to give to someone else), and phillia (normally defined as the love between close friends or siblings). Along this post I will attemp to explain which of these visions seem to be more important on Jane Austen's novel and why I perceive it that way.

First of all, becuase of the era they lived in, the more physical aspects of love were mainly restricted to dances and to the obvious physical attraction that could happen between characters (like in Jane's case, who could easily get some attention because of her external beauty). However, I do not think this is the most clear form of love Jane Austen wants to share  with us in this book.

Austen was a really clever woman who was certainly ahead of her times. Additionally, she also did not have the intention to present us to perfect characters who would willingly give up on their own life and interests for any other random person in the story. For this reason, I do not believe that agape is the type of love she highlights the most then. So, what then?

I believe phillia, the type of love normally related to "friendship", is the one she encourages the most in the novel, which can be clearly seen in the relation between Lizzy and Darcy. Provided that men and women were given totally different roles that somehow subordinated women to men, a romantic relation that considered phillia must have been totally revolutionary back in the Victorian age. However, this is exactly what Austen wants us to see: a romantic relation in which both members can talk like equals, can really trust in each other and believe in each other capacities.

For this reason, I believe the kind of relation that brings Lizzy and Darcy together in Austen's story clearly has a strong component of phillia into it.

Had you ever thought about the different types of love and how they are represented in this story?
Do you think it is important for a romantic relation to have a strong component of "phillia"? why/ why not?    


References

Fromm, E. (2000). Art of loving. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.